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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 10 & 17, 2013
from his past. In Tollygunge his family
did not have a phone line. He was learn-
ing to live without hearing their voices,
to receive news of them only in writing.
Udayan's letters no longer referred to
Naxalbari or ended with slogans. He didn't
explain why this was so. Instead he wrote
about football scores, or about this or that
in the neighborhood---a certain store clos-
ing down, a family they'd known moving
away. The latest film by Mrinal Sen.
Subhash saved a few of these letters,
since it no longer seemed necessary to
throw them away. But their blandness
puzzled him. Though the handwriting
was the same, it was almost as if they'd
been written by a different person.
Letters from his parents referred only
obliquely to Gauri, and only as an exam-
ple of what not to do.
We hope, when the time comes, you will
trust us to settle your future, to choose your
wife and to be present at your wedding. We
hope you will not disregard our wishes, as
your brother did.
He replied, reassuring his father and
mother that his marriage was up to them
to arrange. He sent a portion of his sti-
pend to help pay for the work on the
house, and wrote that he was eager to see
them. And yet, day after day, cut off from
them, he ignored them.
He began his third autumn in Rhode
Island. Once more the leaves of
the trees lost their chlorophyll, replaced
by the shades he had left
behind: vivid hues of cay-
enne and turmeric and gin-
ger pounded fresh every
morning in the kitchen, to
season the food his mother
prepared. The colors in-
tensified until the leaves
began to dwindle, foliage
clustered here and there
among the branches, like
butterflies feeding at the
same source, before falling to the ground.
He thought of Durga Puja coming
again to Calcutta. The past two years, he'd
received a battered parcel from his parents,
containing gifts for him. Kurtas too thin
to wear most of the time in Rhode Island,
bars of sandalwood soap, Darjeeling tea.
He thought of the Mahalaya playing
on All India Radio, coming through the
shortwave. Throughout Tollygunge,
across Calcutta and the whole of West
Bengal, people were waking up in dark-
ness to listen to the oratorio as light crept
into the sky, invoking Durga as she de-
scended to earth with her four children.
Every year at this time, Hindu Bengalis
believed, she came to stay with her father,
Himalaya. For the days of Puja, she relin-
quished her husband, Shiva, before re-
turning once more to married life.
This year no parcel came from his
family. Only a telegram. The message
consisted of two sentences, lifeless, drift-
ingatthetopofasea.
Udayan killed. Come back if you can.
3.He left behind the brief winter days,
the obscure place where he'd
grieved alone. He took a bus to Boston
and boarded a night flight to Europe. The
second flight involved a layover in the
Middle East. At last he landed in Delhi.
From there he boarded an overnight train
to Howrah Station.
As he travelled halfway across India,
from companions on the train he heard
about what had been taking place in Cal-
cutta while he'd been away. Information
that neither Udayan nor his parents had
mentioned in letters. Events Subhash had
not come across in any newspaper in
Rhode Island.
By 1970, people told him, things had
taken a turn. By then the Naxalites were
operating underground. Members sur-
faced only to carry out dra-
matic attacks. They ran-
sacked schools and colleges
across the city. In the mid-
dle of the night, they burned
records and defaced por-
traits, raising red flags. They
plastered Calcutta with im-
ages of Mao. They intimi-
dated voters, hoping to dis-
rupt the elections. They
fired pipe guns on the city's
streets. They hid bombs in public places,
so that people were afraid to sit in a cin-
ema or stand in line at a bank.
Then the targets turned specific: un-
armed traffic constables at busy intersec-
tions, wealthy businessmen, certain edu-
cators, members of the rival party, the
C.P.I.(M.). The killings were sadistic,
gruesome, intended to shock. The wife of
the French consul was murdered in her
sleep. They assassinated Gopal Sen, the
vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University,
while he was taking his evening walk. It
was the day before he'd planned to retire.
They bludgeoned him with steel bars, and
stabbed him four times.
They took control of certain neighbor-
hoods, calling them Red Zones. They
took control of Tollygunge. They set up
makeshift hospitals, safe houses.
But then new legislation was passed,
an old law was renewed. Laws that autho-
rized the police and the paramilitary to
enter homes without a warrant, to arrest
young men without charges. The old law
had been created by the British, to coun-
ter Independence, to cut off its legs.
After that, the police started to cordon
off and search the neighborhoods of the
city. Sealing exits, knocking on doors, in-
terrogating Calcutta's young men. The
police had killed Udayan. This much
Subhash was able to surmise.
Only two people had come to receive
him in the early morning at How-
rah Station. A younger cousin of his fa-
ther's, Biren Kaka, and his wife. They
were standing by a fruit vender, unable to
smile when they spotted him. He under-
stood this diminished welcome, but he
could not understand why, after he'd trav-
elled for more than two days, after he'd
been away for more than two years, his
parents were unwilling to come even this
far to acknowledge his return. When he
left India, his mother had promised a he-
ro's welcome, a garland of flowers draped
around his neck.
The streets were as he remembered.
Crowded with cycle rickshaws in the
early-morning light, the squawking of
their horns sounding to his ears like a
flock of agitated geese.
The walls of the film studios and the
Tolly Club were covered in slogans.
"Make 1970s the decade of liberation."
"Rifles bring freedom, and freedom is
coming."
As they turned beside the small
mosque, Subhash felt his prolonged jour-
ney ending too soon. He was assaulted by
the sour, septic smell of his neighborhood,
of his childhood. The smell of standing
water. The stink of algae, of open drains.
As they approached the two ponds, he
saw that the small home he'd left behind
had been replaced by something impres-
sive, ungainly. Long terraces, like airy cor-
ridors, ran from front to back along the